Civilizational Decline Is a Choice

We have so much worth defending.

J.B. Shurk | September 10, 2026

When pundits say that the United States — or the West, more generally — is “in decline,” what do they mean?  

Are they talking about Western nations’ rising and unsustainable sovereign debts, including a U.S. national debt of over forty trillion dollars?  Are they acknowledging that forty-plus years of “free trade deals” have hollowed out once-bustling manufacturing and industrial towns and left tens of millions of blue-collar workers unemployed and dependent upon government welfare?  Are they admitting that a century-long public policy campaign designed to arrest population growth by discouraging marriage and families and encouraging promiscuity and abortions has created a highly sexualized, self-indulgent, and lonely world?  Are they recognizing that open borders and Western governments’ traitorous betrayals of their own citizens have transformed relatively peaceful countries united by common cultures into battlegrounds where warring tribes from around the world attack Western nations’ histories, churches, traditions, tranquility, security, identities, and beliefs?

These are all symptoms of decline.  There are many more.  But none of these sizable problems is a death sentence for Western civilization.  

After all, we live in a world where fifty million people live as slaves today.  Nearly twenty million of those slaves toil in India and China.  However, when political pundits describe the U.S. and the West as “in decline,” they usually describe the future as belonging to the planet’s two largest slaveholding nations.  From the point of view of Christians and other enslaved minorities, India and China are Hell, while the West is the Promised Land. 

Similarly, communist China runs the most sophisticated domestic surveillance system of any nation in the world.  News flows are strictly regulated.  Social media accounts are monitored.  Purchases are tracked.  Citizens’ “social credit scores” are adjusted to reward “correct” behavior and punish “incorrect” thoughts.  While Western governments are shamelessly copying these forms of soft oppression and constructing their own surveillance states, the degree of........

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